Runners
by sofia-carby
Summary: Post-Mockingjay. 'Once, you asked me about running away. If we hadn't had so many kids. The kid I once had got scattered for the wind as easily as red-leaking dandelion seeds and you ran and left me behind.'Katniss/Gale/Peeta.


Once, you asked me about running away. If we hadn't had so many kids. The kid I once had got scattered for the wind as easily as red-leaking dandelion seeds and you ran and left me behind.

I sit against the rocks, cool and digging into my back, overlooking the valley. It has been three years today, two yesteryears since we sat here. Blackberry-stained fingers and sunlight baking the skin off of our arms. There is only a ghost left, something I can't see, next to me. Void once made up of camaraderie and safety and air pregnant with honeysuckle.

If I am a candle – made up of fire as they say – you were my match. Something to strike against, something that lit me. Fight, it said. Fight through this hunger and this freezing Wednesday and this broken ankle and this reaping. Fight through this life and together we will make it bearable. Fight for them, the skeletons with flesh on their bones waiting at home.

There is no them and there is no us. Now I am only melting, wax dripping all around me. Diminishing.

It is a curios thing, really, to win. Win. A short word, an easy syllable on the tongue. It holds so much power. You can win a trust. You can win the Hunger Games. You can win a war.

We won, they say. All the time. A pat on the back in the square, a shrill voice accompanying. oh oh we've won. Pastel colors on the television; _Peace. Freedom. Winning._

Just, no one seems to know what exactly. I won a dead sister, a lost friend and a free life. A life free enough to sit here and touch the void with my fingers; exploring, in no hurry to get home because it doesn't exist.

_We could do it, you know. Run off. _

Perhaps we could have. If we had run that day - the bitter taste of goat cheese and guilt in our mouths - would I still hate you? I wonder. Perhaps I still would've seen you as responsible. For letting her become a real ghost.

In my dreams, I see it all the time. Her body sprung apart, ripped into a void. White and white and white everywhere. Sometimes red, too, but I never really see that. I only see the moment of change, not the afterwards. My mind lets me skip that.

I look over the valley. What is beyond? I look inside myself. What?

I make my way back to the district slowly. I am in no hurry. Surely, he will wonder.

Pace the room, unknowingly drag his hands through his hair. Flour catching in the honey. Watch the sunset, worry now associated with his favourite colour. It's my fault, of course. As so many things are.

_Give me some space_, I'd said, one day over the flowerbeds bathing in primroses. Space for the voids I now have in my mind, voids that you can never fill, but I didn't say that out loud. _All right_, he'd said, in that soft voice of his. The one I needed so badly, a soft glue voice keeping my sanity together, even though the pieces are horribly uneven.

Walking through District 12 is odd, surreal even. Houses are being rebuilt, new people moving here. Apparently the woods here are enviable if you've lived your entire life in Eight; caught in a web of waste and fumes. Yet, it feels the same. The coal dust still here. The mines still open. People shopping in the square.

The mayor's house is rebuilt, too. Built upon strawberries and blonde hair and corpses. I try not to feel.

Technically, I still own our old house. Or what used to stand there. Now there's only a space in the middle of other houses; everything cleaned away and burned, again. I watched, because he thought it would make me feel better. It didn't.

I walk towards it; sometimes I do this. Today I see a tulip growing in the outer corner. Pale yellow, the color of the ice-cream she always wanted but we never could afford. Or, once we did. It was her tenth birthday.

After school, we had gone to the sweet shop to buy the ice cream. We'd stood outside the glass separating us and the ice cream, palms pressed flat against it. There had been pink and blue and green and yellow. _What flavour do you want_, I'd asked her._ Everything_, she'd said and laughed. She didn't get everything but she got a cone with three yellow scopes. It melted in sticky streams over her tiny fist and her hair got caught in it but she didn't care and neither did I.

The tulip is hugging itself; warmer yellow at the base of it. I imagine it unfolding and refolding and dying. I dig it up. Sorry, I almost want to say. You can't live here. Nothing can.

I walk past the bakery (closed, which means he will be home) and toward Victor's Village. Actually, it's not called that anymore. They say that we are all Victors now. United. Winning. Victors.

Peeta is outside his house, sitting on the porch in the draining light. Flour in his hair and nails shred in his worry. Bad habits rub off, apparently. I hold my breath and watch him for a moment, before he sees me. I could walk around his house to get to mine but tonight I don't feel like doing that. So I walk up his driveway, the gravel announcing my arrival. I see a familiar scenario upon his face. Relief. Slight anger. Love.

I deserve none of it.

'Hi,' he says.

'Hi,' I say. I hold out the tulip. 'For you.' Because I can think of nothing else to say.

He lights up, his entire face falling into itself in a smile. My words spreading wildfire between his dimples. 'Really?' he says. Hopefulness seeping into the word is something obvious these days, because I rarely hear it. Despair and regret and pain, sorrow and anger and sadness, love and even lust. That's a familiar ground for me to step on. This isn't.

I realize I have done the incorrect thing. By presenting him this, this in his eyes gift, he will think I am changing. Recovering. Sometimes they use those words, the specialists from the Capitol that came to visit. Recovering from fucking what? I want to ask and scream and claw into their faces. I never do, though. The old I would have, perhaps. She would burn them to the ground.

'Yes,' I answer. I don't smile because I desperately don't want him to get the wrong idea. Don't think too much of me, Peeta.

If this were three years and a day ago, the old I would have laughed. A tulip for the Boy with the Bread. Way to repay him; bravo, Katniss.

It's all I can give, though. A gift that in one week, give or take, will die at his kitchen table; nothing left but dry yellow snowflakes and grimy water. Something he can't get attached to, something he cannot keep.

'Thank you,' he says. His voice is serious, his eyes tentative and hungry. _Give me more_, it says.

I don't answer. I just let him into my bed that night, so he can watch the show together with me. At the soundtrack of my screams, a sound well-known to him now, he just hugs me tighter. Right over my naked navel, he always places his arms. Splays his fingers over the spaces between my ribs as if I will leak away there. I feel his breath gather at the nape of my neck. He never asks for anything. Maybe this is enough. Some perverse pleasure of being close to me, flesh upon flesh, as I sweat my way through my nightmares. Sometimes I tell myself that that's what it is. But it isn't. He just tries to keep me alive. That's worse.

In the mornings, he is always gone. I run my fingers over the cold dent he made in the covers. The sheets smell of sweat and morning stiffness and the Games. I want him back. I want him closer still, pressing into me and taking everything away. Stepping over the blurry line that separates pleasure and pain.

We tried that once and I cried and he said sorry, sorry, sorry. It was awkward and felt uncomfortable but good, still. Afterwards he asked me if I loved him and I said yes, because I do.

Sometimes I wonder if it would have hurt if it had been with you. Probably. You probably wouldn't have been gentle, either. Fire, fire, and explode.

Sometimes, I imagine what it would have been like. To do that with you. Your warm palms on my hips, your lips everywhere like when you kissed my neck in the woods. Take all my clothes off and see the outside and then you'd turn me inside out. Dark eyes and shoulders above. _Catnip_, you'd moan, roughly, when you came. Not softly, like Peeta. Like he's asking for permission. You'd just take and not ask.

I visit Haymitch since neither of us have lives. It's been sucked out and we are complete failures. That's what he tells me as we eat breakfast and he drinks. I watch his throat move as he swallows, between his never-ending talking. Mostly there're complaints, and nasty remarks at me, but I am not bothered. It feels familiar; words I drape around myself I order to keep whole.

Later, I see you in the square. I feel like I have been knocked on my back, a plastic bag over my head.

It's just after I've visited Peeta in the bakery, licking sugar sprinkles from the soft pretzels off of my fingers. He was so happy when I walked in. I told him I just wanted to watch him knead the dough. It sounded so odd and he smiled a little but let me. Then we ate the pretzels and I talked about Haymitch. It was a step. It was nice.

It's just a glimpse of you but it makes me greedy. You are standing with your family; clutching the shoulders of your brothers and tugging at the braid of your sister. They have grown; a proof that time does not stand still. Not all stop growing when they have barely brushed adolescence. After, I made a habit of avoiding them altogether.

You look the same, only older. Same hair, same eyes. You seem bigger, like you've finally left the skeletons behind. I watch your face, searching for something. I don't find it or I am afraid of finding it and I close my eyes and smell burnt blonde hair. Then I run.

I run faster than my body's used to but it isn't hard. I realize this is the moment. This is the moment I run off. Blueberry bushes scratch at my bare knees and the air is too warm to give any relief but I run.

I don't know how long but suddenly I am on the ground. I lie among the mud and the undergrowth and I throw up. Then I scream. Right there, I let it all out. It echoes but I can't hear it and I am crying but I can't feel it. I rip the plastic bag from my head and spill it contents out.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I tell the tiny ghost in my mind, her presence always obvious. The ghost that becomes flesh and bone at night and dislocates in the air. Again and again and again. I want to go mad and lose myself. I wait for it but it doesn't happen. I wait for her to forgive me but she doesn't. In my mind, she never will.

I pull my jacket over my head, and am reminded when Prim and I used to do this on early Sunday mornings. Make paths under the covers, bare feet and toes getting lost and tangled in giggles. When the air ran out under we used to pretend we were under the ocean we'd only glimpsed on the screen and I used to pull her up to make sure she didn't drown. Two living girls with too-hollow faces and hair like night and day. Now nothing but two carcasses, one still with flesh on her bones. The fabric suffocates my grief.

Later, I feel myself being lifted off the ground. I am exhausted and filthy and don't have the energy to do anything; to fight or feel regret or look at you. Your arms are under the bare curve of my knees and I can hear your heart beating underneath your warm chestbones; a sound from before.

I can feel your breathing against my neck and your forehead touches mine. We blend sweat and I touch your hair, sticky against my fingers.

I clear my throat and think of all the things I want to tell you, to confess, to do. I ache all over.

'I hate you.'

'I know.'

Then you carry me to the place neither of us calls home any longer.


End file.
